A Perfect Electrometer

My Cambridge tutor was bubbling over with pleasure one morning in 1962 after reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, the one she kept between 1800 and 1803 when living with her poet brother William at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. What he had been particularly taken with was something she wrote on 14 May 1802 when the two had been walking in the woods alongside Grasmere: ‘William teased himself with seeking an epithet for the Cuckow.’ I never forgot this slightly comical picture of the creative process, but it was almost thirty years before I came to read her journal myself when doing a book on Coleridge among the lakes and mountains.

I suspect my tutor had bought a copy of the Pelican paperback called Home at Grasmere which appeared in 1960, compiled by Colette Clark. She had had the clever idea of interleaving extracts from the journal with the Wordsworth poems most closely linked to them. In 1969 her father Kenneth Clark, in the eleventh chapter of Civilisation, ‘The Worship of Nature’, was to call Dorothy ‘this shy, unassuming woman . . . the saint and prophetess’ of the new religion of the Romantics. Just after he had met her for the first time, in June 1797, Coleridge wrote of her manners – ‘simple, ardent, impressive’ – of ‘her most innocent soul’ – of ‘her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature’ – of her taste, ‘a perfect electrometer’. He had seen at once the qualities that were soon to make her such a vital auxiliary in his and Wordsworth’s creative, collaborative uprush among the Quantock Hills in Somerset that led to the Lyrical Ballads, and then during the attempt to rekindle those hotbed days starting a year or more later and hundreds of miles to the north, among the Lakes. But what has been abundantly clear since her Grasmere journal was first published in 1897 is that it is itself priceless and incomparable, called by Robert Gittings, the Keats and Hardy expert and her biographer, ‘the prime example in our literature of a purely unconscious masterpiece’. Some stand out among those who have written about nature: Coleridge himself in his notebooks, Francis Kilvert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Jefferies and, closer to our day, perhaps John Stewart Collis and Robert Macfarlane. For many Dorothy Wordsworth remains first among equals in this band. The effects of light and shade, mist and cloud, sunlight, moonshine and starlight; water falling as rain, as a lake’s surface, as a rushing stream, or when throwing itself over a waterfall; the birds and beasts, including her neighbours’ cows of which she was rather frightened, and the sheep; the flowers, moss, grass and trees, particularly the oaks and birches – these were what caught her eye, alone or in combination, as when ‘the moon shone like herrings in the water’, or when they formed into a view. Like Kilvert she was an avid recorder of noises – ‘the small birds are singing, lambs bleating, cuckow calling, the thrush sings by fits. Thomas Ashburner’s axe is going quietly (without passion) in the orchard. Hens are cackling, flies humming, the women talking together at their doors.’ Like nearly all before about 1820, she had as background the luxury of silence and, at night, darkness. In those days everybody lived much closer to the weather, but where she and the Romantics in general – Turner in particular – were different was in their urge to get it down on canvas or paper, to transform a mere topic of conversation into an accessory or outright subject of art. What was it in the Wordsworth family background that threw up the pairing of the ‘exquisite sister’ and her brother? The very lack of family seems to be the answer. Their mother had died in 1778, when Dorothy was 7; she never saw her father from that point until his death in 1783. She went first to live with an exemplary cousin in Halifax then, aged 15, to her mother’s dour parents in Penrith, before escaping with an uncle and his wife to their Norfolk rectory in 1788, where she immersed herself in parish visiting, running the Sunday school and, in her words, acting as ‘head nurse, housekeeper and tutoress’ of her young cousins. Only occasionally did she see her four brothers; William went to Cambridge then, swept up in the revolutionary fervour, was in France in 1791–2, leaving just before the birth of his daughter by his French lover, Annette Vallon, and the outbreak of war. Dorothy was totally accepting of this, but her uncle would not have William in Norfolk, so in 1794 she left, made a visit to the Lakes with him and began a tour round her relations while he went off to try and find a way out of his troubles. They only met up again in mid-1795, when William had been left a bit of money and then had the offer of a house, rent-free, south of Chard in Dorset. Suddenly the opportunity of a home of their own, of family life was there. The healing process could commence, they could start to open out and give nature full attention, while Dorothy’s simplicity and clarity of vision could begin to help lead William away from the tired and confining ‘poetic’ diction of the day. He was later to say, ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.’ Then in June 1797 Coleridge descended on their new domesticity and like some pied piper led them off to Nether Stowey in north Somerset where he and his family had set up house. Firmly under his spell, they moved to Alfoxden nearby until the end of June 1798 and there from January to April she kept her first surviving journal. On 2 February they went for a walk with Coleridge after dinner. ‘A very clear afternoon. We lay sidelong upon the turf, and gazed upon the landscape until it melted into more than natural loveliness. The sea very uniform, of a pale greyish blue, only one distant bay, bright blue as a sky; had there been a vessel sailing up it, a perfect image of delight.’ On 22 March she spent the morning starching and hanging out linen, then the next day Coleridge came to dine, bringing with him his completed Ancient Mariner. The mix of hypersensitive, supercharged observation with mundane domestic detail is present from the start, and one is grateful for it: the one without the other would be intolerable. Dorothy was constantly occupied: cooking, baking, making, mending and altering clothes, starching, ironing, working in the garden, dealing with its seasonal surpluses of gooseberries, peas or beans, or the fish caught by the menfolk in the lake. Then there was William’s poetry to be copied out, correspondence with friends and relations to be kept up, books to be read, German studied, visitors entertained and accommodated, while William’s and her own very regular ailments had to be dealt with and endured, as had the frequently foul weather. Her reward for her labours was to be able to walk, in the daytime and often at night, in the incomparable landscape which she then managed by magic to preserve for us in her journal, to which William often turned for inspiration or as an aide-memoire.

[11 October 1800] After dinner we walked up Greenhead Gill in search of a sheepfold . . . The colours of the mountains soft and rich, with orange fern [bracken], the cattle pasturing upon the hill-tops, kites sailing in the sky above our heads, sheep bleating and in lines and chains and patterns scattered over the mountains. They come down and feed on the little green islands in the beds of the torrents and so may be swept away . . . Look down the brook and see the drops rise upwards and sparkle in the air. [See William’s poem ‘Michael’.]

The most famous example is Dorothy’s description on 15 April 1802 of a belt of daffodils alongside Ullswater, which ‘tossed and reeled and danced and . . . looked so gay, ever dancing, ever changing’. William was not to write ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ until 1804. On the other hand, a month earlier, on 13 March, he had been trying to write a poem about their encounter with a tall beggar woman and her sons in June 1800. When Dorothy read her journal entry about it to him, ‘an unlucky thing it was for he could not escape from those very words, and so he could not write the poem’. Between those two dates comes that ‘divine morning’, and wonderful juxtaposition, on 27 March, when ‘At breakfast Wm wrote part of an ode. Mr Olliff sent the dung and Wm went to work in the garden. We sate all day in the orchard.’ This was not just any old ode, but rather the start of ‘Intimations of Immortality’ – divine indeed. The spring of 1802 was a period of inspiration to match the one in 1797–8 in the Quantocks, but this time only for William. Coleridge had come with his family to live in Keswick, about twelves miles north of Grasmere, in July 1800, hoping to revive the Somerset experience. However, he was much troubled, out of love with his wife whom Dorothy saw was quite unsuited to him, and at the same time hopelessly smitten with Sara Hutchinson. He was increasingly resorting to laudanum and the brandy bottle and in October 1800 Wordsworth refused to include his poem ‘Christabel’, which he had recently completed, in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. This was a blow which his biographer Richard Holmes thinks effectively killed his ability to compose poetry as such, so instead he wrote those remarkable prose descriptions to be found in his notebooks. The culmination of the Grasmere journal is not about the Lakes at all, but covers the period from July 1802, when William and Dorothy were able to visit his daughter and her mother in Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, until they returned to Yorkshire where William married his long-time sweetheart Mary Hutchinson in October. She was the elder sister of the Sara with whom Coleridge was in love, and an old and close friend of Dorothy. In Civilisation Kenneth Clark made play with what he saw as a parallel: ‘Both Byron and Wordsworth fell deeply in love with their sisters. The inevitable prohibition was a disaster for both of them.’ He claimed Wordsworth suffered most because at least Byron wrote Don Juan, ‘whereas Wordsworth, after the heart-breaking renunciation of Dorothy, gradually lost inspiration’. This last is undeniable. Graham Hough, Cambridge Professor of English, recalled how he ‘once knew a man in a prison camp who divided his copy of Wordsworth’s poems into two halves, retained the first, and swapped the second for the bottom half of a pair of pyjamas. He rightly judged that the intellectual loss was very slight.’ But while the relationship between Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh was what we might call full-on, the love between the Wordsworths was something else. She may have written, one day when he was away, ‘O the Darling! Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it in the fire,’ and on another how they sat at the window – ‘I on a chair and William with his hand on my shoulder. We were in deep Silence and Love, a blessed hour.’ But these were expressions of a mutual devotion without a sexual element, which saw Dorothy accompanying the newlyweds in the post-chaise back to Grasmere and there forming a triangular household with them. She was soon deeply absorbed, housekeeping as before, helping Mary with her pregnancies and looking after her and William’s children. In January 1803 she had written what turned out to be her last journal entry at Dove Cottage, and it was not because of any heartbreak, but because she was too busy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Roger Hudson 2019